NM Rain

Have you ever wondered why the weather forecasters use phrases such as ‘a possibility of rain showers’? Or why they forecast rain in Albuquerque, but then it does not rain at your house? It is because our forecast models miss fundamental physics to forecast rain, particularly during the summer months.

This project is working with Suominen data for precipitable water, soundings that give vertical profiles of meteorological variables and precipitation data to show the correlation between precipitation and saturation fraction (a measure of moisture in the atmospheric column). If we confirm the correlation between the two, setting up a denser network of precipitable water GPS stations could lead to much better and locally more accurate forecasts of rain.